Bitten by a milk snake

While walking with my mother along a bike path near Burnt Hills, New York, I saw a small milk snake. I picked it up and let it run between my fingers until it became scared or impatient and bit me on the forearm. Its teeth were so small and sharp that it felt like getting a shot with a very fine needle. Impressed with its nerve, I put the snake back down in the grass. On my skin was a small V of tiny red dots.

The milk snake is one of the prettiest snakes in the Northeast, and one that I’ve rarely seen. Thoreau wrote about it, as he did about nearly every creature to be found near Concord. He called it a “checkered adder” and noted the “forked light space” on the back of its head. His description of one (on May 28, 1854) was rather detailed and technical, suggesting that he killed it, but the act of doing so seems to have made him thoughtful.

“The inhumanity of science concerns me,” he wrote, “as when I am tempted to kill a rare snake that I may ascertain its species. I feel that this is not the means of acquiring true knowledge.”

A Political Education by André Schiffrin

André Schiffrin is the founder of The New Press, the extraordinary nonprofit publishing house that he created in 1990 after being forced out of his position at the head of Pantheon Books. A Political Education is his modestly brief, yet eye-opening memoir (published by the independent Melville House).

Though raised in New York City, Schiffrin was born in France, where his father was an eminent publisher and the creator of the Pléiade series of classic literature (the inspiration for the Library of America series in the US). He has returned regularly for many years, and began in recent years to divide his time between New York and Paris. Schiffrin’s French roots, and his early immersion in socialist thought and political activism, give him a valuable perspective on politics and publishing in the US.

It’s sobering, though not surprising, to learn that New York City has lost 90% of the bookstores it had in 1945. France has plenty of bookstores, but the swallowing up of independent publishers by conglomerates has advanced even farther there than it has in the US.

Something that did surprise me was the extent to which the insanities of the Korean War prefigured those of Vietnam, and how Cold War censorship and self-censorship covered up those insanities. I didn’t know, for instance, that “MacArthur had proposed dropping fifty atomic bombs along the thirty-eighth parallel dividing the two countries, to make sure that a radioactive border would keep Korea forever divided.” Or that “at least eighteen of the twenty-two major cities [of North Korea] were virtually obliterated” and “more napalm was dropped on the hapless Koreans than we were to use during the whole of the Vietnam War.”

Self-censorship is still with us, unfortunately, and the need for independent voices. In the first two years of the Iraq War, Schiffrin points out, no major US publisher would release a book that was critical of the war. 

More on the black hole

The New York Times gave more details today on the possibility that a proton smasher in Switzerland could destroy the earth.

Today we require more than prayers that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world. We demand hard-headed calculations. But whom can we trust to do them?

That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.

Thoreau imitates a Canada goose

March 20, 1855
Trying the other day to imitate the honking of geese, I found myself flapping my sides with my elbows, as with wings, and uttering something like the syllables mow-ack with a nasal twang and twist in my head; and I produced their note so perfectly in the opinion of the hearers that I thought I might possibly draw a flock down.

Giving by Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton’s recent book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World brings together examples of how people are giving time, money, and skills to change the world for the better. Some of my favorite people and organizations are discussed — such as Kiva, Ashoka, ONE, ShoreBank, and Sustainable South Bronx — as well as many that I didn’t know about. It’s a bracing wake-up call for for those who think the country is mired in apathy.

In addition to his own Clinton Foundation, Clinton devotes considerable space to the medical missionary work of Paul Farmer, whose book The Uses of Haiti I reviewed at length for Transition. There’s also a chapter on Heifer International, whose marketing I have admired for years. Heifer not only brings home the personal impact of even small gifts, but its attractively produced “magalogs” make giving a donation feel like shopping for a friend. It was good to read that their work is as effective as their marketing.

Clinton discusses organizations that have given books for needy schoolchildren in Zimbabwe and Nepal, but doesn’t mention Books for Africa, which has been doing excellent work for years. When my mother visited me in Zimbabwe in 1990, she brought a suitcase of medical instruments of the sort that American hospitals use once and discard. I was pleased to see that an organization called Doc to Dock is now collecting and distributing them on a much wider basis.